SOME things are just simply beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Such as, what makes a cat deposit a dead mouse into your work boot in the middle of the night?

I may be woefully misjudging our domestic animals, but I am pretty damned sure that the thing didn't feel himself near death's door and then scale the side of my Wellington dimension work boot in order to pop his clogs inside my clog. It wasn't just any old mouse, he must have been nearly a foot long because he didn't fall out when I did my customary turnout of the boot before putting it on.

I don't mind telling you that I nearly jumped out of my skin when I put my hand in the boot to remove said obstruction, expecting one of yesterday's socks rather than a deceased rodent.

Did the cat really think that was going to make my day and that I was going to give it double rations for the rest of the week? Or does it just hate me?

Another such imponderable is why people buy certain houses. There is one house, not too far away from where we live: a long house, on a bend, close to a farm nothing too unusual there. What makes this house unusual is the three large cracks that very nearly turn it into three detached properties. In fact, that they are so jaw-droppingly large that they made us declare our amazement that anybody could ever consider buying a place that had no further need for the front door because you had a choice of any three easy ways into the property. We laughed at the place each time we drove past.

Then we were introduced to a friend of a friend in a bar. He started to describe where he lived, mentioning the farm, the bend. Before I could help myself I dived in with all guns blazing, making some tactful comment along the lines of "Not that place with the bloody awful cracks?" That'll be the one.

It turned out that the cracked façade was just the visible part of a large corps de ferme that had been turned into a Chambre d'hôtes and gîtes business, and that the cracks had been caused during the huge canicule or heatwave that we experienced five years ago. The clay soil beneath the building shrank, the building stayed the same length that it always had been, but cracked, and when the wet came back the middle parted company with the ends, if you see what I mean. Apparently an underpinning firm had poured lorryloads of concrete underneath the building and it was now stable. All it now needed to stop it looking like the house of horrors was somebody to come along with a jackhammer to hack off all the render, sandblast the stone back to life, and then re-point it with a nice bit of lime mortar that would let it flex a little in the temperature extremes. Enter Trevor and Sue.

As much as standing in front of a wall with a vibrating jackhammer with a diesel compressor blasting in your ears can ever be called a pleasure, it was truly a pleasure to hack away the old cement and to start to lose those cracks. Between myself and Sue we have pointed up most of the façade and the wind no longer whistles through that particular building.

So what kind of an idiot buys a building that looked as bad as that, but with a little TLC looks fantastic? Probably a shrewd one.